Instructions

This facility does not translate English or German into
Yiddish.
It just interconverts various Yiddish representations.
Unless you select other input and output forms,
you are expected to type in YIVO transcription form and you get back a
spelling check of your text.
Once it looks right, you can select instead to receive your text in
various other output forms.
You might want to use cut-and-paste from other programs to enter your text.

GIF is a picture format. This option will display a picture
of your text in Yiddish letters.
GIF output is limited to one visible page of text. If you want GIF for a long
document,
split the document into pieces and collect the separate GIF output files.
PostScript is a printer
format; it is only useful if you have a PostScript viewer
(for Win 32
or for a
Mac)
or a PostScript printer.
PDF is the portable document format viewable and printable by
Adobe Acrobat or, on Unix,
xpdf.
Unicode is a multi-alphabet encoding supported by
most browsers. Mac and
MS-Windows have coding methods for Hebrew if you have the
Hebrew language kit.
If you want to enter your text in MS-Windows code for the shraybmashinke
to convert, make sure you tell your browser that your page is in Hebrew Windows
encoding.
QText is a
multilingual text editor
for MS platforms.
Lingomail is a
multilingual mail composer and reader
for MS platforms.

When you ask for definitions, you may type any number of words in either
English or Yiddish. Each word will be searched in the
dictionary. The dictionary is a work in progress and is not being built by
professional lexicographers. Don't rely too heavily on it.

YIVO transcription form

YIVO transcription form uses the following consonants:

b g d h v z kh t y l m n s f p ts k r sh tsh zh dj

the following vowels:

a e i o u oy ay ey

and the following special punctuation:

---

The following sentence is correctly transliterated.

ikh bin gekumen azoy vayt tsu shraybn a bisl mame-loshn!

You can use the | character as a nonprinting
character to
circumvent usual orthography rules. For instance, write oys|heyln
instead of oysheyln to avoid the sh turning into a
shin; write elt|stn instead of eltstn to avoid the
ts turning into a tsadik.

If you want a compound built on a Hebrew root, try separating the Hebrew root
from prefixes and suffixes by |. For instance,
farkholemt should be written far|kholem|t so that the
Hebrew lookup succeeds.

Don't use capital letters except for the first letters of Hebrew proper
names (like Refoyl and Binyomen).

If you have a number, write it forwards (1997, not 7991).
This rule also holds for numbers with embedded punctuation, all of which is
treated as a region of left-to-right text within the normal right-to-left
rendition of Yiddish (such as 5-17-1997).

If you need a Hebrew word, first spell it phonetically.
Unaccented vowels often should be spelled with an "e", as in
borekh, bimkem, and maskem. If the
spelling checker accepts your input, it should be spelled fine in the output.
If you have misspelled slightly, the spelling checker will suggest a
substitute.
Otherwise, mail will be sent to the maintainer, and the word should appear
shortly on the spelling list.
If you need Hebrew before then, you may use the following letters:

aleph

#

veys

B

vov

V

khes

H

kof

K

ayin

e

sin

Q

sof

T

tof

W

pasekh

^a

komets

^o

khirik

^i

kholam

^O

segol

^e

kubuts

^U

tseyre

^A

shva

^:

Formatting

By default, text output in GIF, PostScript, or PDF will be formatted to fit
standard pages. This formatting is performed by TeX. Consequently,

Line breaks in your input are ignored.

A blank line separates paragraphs.

You can introduce TeX commands, which all start with
\, in your YIVO input.
You must put TeX commands on lines by themselves.
TeX commands are case-sensitive.

Algemeiner Zhurnal

A silent alef is placed between vowels where otherwise one would need
a dot (melupn vov or khirik yud) to disambiguate letters.

There is no sin-dot.

There is no pasekh-tsvey-yudn; the reader must be able to know when
tsvey-yudn is (1) Northern Yiddish /aj/, Polish Yiddish /aː/, Ukrainian Yiddish
/a/, and when it is (2) Northern and Ukrainian Yiddish /e/, Polish Yiddish
/aj/. (The letters between solidus signs are IPA symbols.)

This page (and all the
freely available Unix software
it invokes!) is maintained by
Refoyl Finkl.
It is mentioned in
.
Feel free to send
me
(without the underscore)
mail if you are having any trouble transforming your Yiddish text.